Growing numbers of users are wirelessly accessing systems such as the internet and cellular telephone systems. Energy efficiency in mobile devices designed to operate with these wireless access systems remains a critical issue in the design of wireless communication systems. Energy efficiency can be improved by employing lower power schemes, e.g., sleep modes or variations thereof. These lower power schemes can reduce energy consumption by cycling between a higher power consumption mode (e.g., an active state) and a lower power consumption mode (e.g., a reduced activity or inactive state) as will be appreciated by those of skill in the art.
A drawback to lower power schemes is that they can be associated with degraded communications performance. As an example, spending time in an inactive state can decrease signal reception periods and thus decrease communication performance (e.g., when a device is asleep it generally does not receive or transmit data, etc.) In order to provide a high Quality of Service (QoS), wireless standards can support various power saving schema. Each of these power saving schema can include different sleep times or sleep patterns that can have different balances between energy consumption and device performance. For example, the IEEE 802.16e standard provides at least three unique Power Saving Classes (PSCs) which aim to reduce the power consumption of mobile devices based on different types of anticipated wireless traffic. Conventional selection of the various PSCs in wireless systems can improve energy efficiency but much room remains in optimizing the selection of these PSCs for improved energy efficient sleep mode selection schemes.